Sometimes, however, quality can drop (which usually happens due to a lack of knowledge).

Every blog post is like a web page in terms of search engine ranking and you can optimize each post with specific keywords for search engines.

When writing these SEO articles, there are several things that you should keep in mind.

Whenever I hire a new author to work on one of our blogs, I have to give them manual inputs and checklists to help them to write better articles. Apart from selecting topics, there is a complete SEO checklist that must be followed.

(Note: I used to send this information out in an email to all the authors in my blog network. So I thought it would be a good idea to compile all of this information into a post. This way, ShoutMeLoud readerswill also benefit from this information and learn how to write SEO articlesas well.)

Also note that in this post I will not be covering keyword research as keyword research requires a detailed post of its own.

All of the most popular SEO plugins allow you to add meta descriptions to a post. These descriptions play a major role in search engine ranking.

Think of a meta description as a sales copy for your blog post:

In 156 characters, you need to add your keywords and create a description that is seductive enough for users to click on it.

If you have not added meta descriptions in the past, you should start doing it immediately.

Meta descriptions are very important.

You should go back to any of your previously published posts which do not have a meta description and add one.

By optimizing your post meta descriptions, you are ensuring that every post you write has the potential to drive a maximum amount of traffic to your site.

Google sees every blog post as a different web page so you can rank every postfor certain keywords.

Meta descriptions are great places to put keywords.

3. Image Alt Attribute

Google can’t read images.

Text is how Google recognizes an image.

To ensure that search engines can understand what an image is about, you must be sure to use proper image names.

Many people make the mistake of uploading images with names like image001.jpg.

This is a huge mistake!

When naming an image, keep the name relevant to image itself.

For example, if you take a screenshot of an AdSense dashboard, and you name the image “AdSense”, it will not be targeted. Instead, you need to use a name like “AdSense-dashboard”.

Here at ShoutMeLoud, we use an effective plugin called SEO Friendly Image which uses the image name as its “alt (alternate text) attributes”. This way, when people search for an image at Google Image Search, they will land on an image in one of our blog posts.

If you choose to not use such a plugin, you can always manually add altattributes when you upload an image.

I have seen positive results when using keywords in image anchor text(when naming an image), so you should at least use keywords in your image alt text.

4. Interlink and Anchor Text

When writing a new post, it’s always a good idea to link back to old blog postsso that readers will stick around your site for longer and also so that search engines can re-crawl these old posts.

This helps in better navigability of your site which reduces the bounce rate- another important SEO factor.

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"Shouting since 2008"
Harsh Agrawal is the founder & CEO of ShoutDreams, INC.
A blog scientist by mind and a passionate blogger by heart. His blog, ShoutMeLoud receives 1.5 million Pageviews/month and has over 832K subscribers.

COMMENTs ( 142 )

This Yoast seo plugin helps us a lot as it indicates all our basic seo mistakes in our blog.we can correct it .
Alt attributes also have a crucial part in ranking an article.
Your image must contain your focus keywords inthe alt attributes.

Thanks for sharing your success report and way that chose to fly in the sky. You have shared every thing how we can get more visitors on any post with out back linking. I will try to use this way to get more vistors

Every time I visit shoutmeloud, I learned new thing. This article really gonna help me a lot.There are so much task related with SEO. This article really helpful to write a SEO optimised article.
Thanks harsh

about focus keyword, how many you choose a focus keyword to make perfect SEO for your article?
and how about a keyword in early title, or first paragraph in an article, or etc, and how many percents of density keyword for 1 article?

You are my inspiration, Harsh.Visiting your blog inspires me to work hard and remains of so many positive things that I should do in order to achieve what you did till date.This post is amazing about on page SEO and helps me to rectify few silly mistakes i commit like missing ALT tags etc., Thanks for the post :)

Very informative, thanks! Writing for SEO without sounding like an SEO is easier these days. Ridiculous keyword stuffing is redundant and luckily Google is better penalizing for it. I’m generating ideas on my next piece of content with keyword tools. I like search suggestion tools like sg.serpstat.com but being organic in your writing isn’t something you can acquire with a tool)

Hi Harsh congratulations for your site.Articles are well explained and i am learning a lot from your posts.
But i have a question.
I have a free wordpress blog if i choose to buy custom domain it costs me nearly $18 for a year.So should i buy it ’cause i don’t want to spend money for buying domain name and hosting .
So if i buy domain from wordpress who will host my site?i mean i am not buying hosting service.And is this a good idea buying only domain ?

Hi Harsh,
I was in search of tips or say the exact way of writing a blog post which is perfectly SEO optimized. These tips should be known by every blogger to get traffic from search engines. Will be waiting for such more posts. Thanks for this awesome post!

Another great article, I already knew this because I am using seo plugin by yeast. But thanks so much for other important points like changing the title and permalink after publishing, i will make sure I keep this in mind because I have already done that to 2 of my posts. Thanks.

Harsh its a nice article about SEO techniques and details about. Yeah this method are good to optimized the article.
Thanks for writing this content.
Many of the people forget about using keyword at alt text for images and you have better described in this post.
Really this post gonna help us a lot to rank our post too.

Thanks your articles always give us important knowledge about blogging. I can understand importance of SEO friendly articles because these articles will help us to get good rank on search engine like Google, Yahoo and Bing etc.

Your articles are really great and helpful. I have a doubt about meta descriptions. Do the search engines really honor them ? I have observed for some of my blog posts Google does not show a given meta description, instead it picks up some relevant context to given search query and shows it. Any idea about this ?

Hi.. Harsh.. Thank you for the great article on Seo. I am building a free vst download blog. Most of them have the same keywords and I don’t know to optimize them. I got no visitors. May this be because of my competitors rank much higher? Please help.. Thank you. And by the way..I am an Indonesian

Dude u have no idea how helpful u r right now lol. I’ve been blogging for a little bit over a year plus now and im having to go back to old posts to optimize them. Im reading through your other articles now man. Im way past the frustration for no traffic phase so i have to get this now.

@Robin
We all make such mistakes initially to make the article titles & subheading look more prominent. I also did the same mistake, and later on edited all 2K+ posts on my blog to improve it.
Result: I’m getting 1 million page views a month & 90% of traffic is organic.

Nice and brief article. Shoutmeloud is a great website and I learn many things from here. Really appreciate your work. Can you plz share an article about write seo friendly content. Most of time I write good articles specially tutorials that are originally written by me. But most of my post does not rank well in google. I am using only low competition keywords. Plz guide me to clear my concept about writing seo friendly content.

@Anchit
That’s a very good question & to answer that:
Search engine like Google doesn’t count words like “A”, “An”, “The” & many other stop words. This helps them to keep their database size at minimal, and they pick the important words to rank a page. Though I would suggest to use keywords like “How to” “Tutorial” as users use such words to search. For all other stop words, it’s good to not have them in permalink. This way, your post stays more targeted to your target keyword.

Thanks for this post, Harsh. I am not that new to blogging, but my starting days in blogging were not that easy. Nowadays I started SEO optimizing the articles. I got many tips from this one especially. Thanks Again. BTW, I am a regular Visitor to your Blog.. :) Almost Daily :D

really a great information, but still a doubt. Is it necessary to change default permalink ? Means, as per my view, whole title in permalink gives better SEO. However, you suggested to change it. One more question, as there is a limit of permalink that cannot exceed 70 characters. Is there any short limit beyond which we cannot shorten our permalink ?
-Nitin

Hi Harsh,
The mentioned site is my free blog which I build using wordpress. I want start my own blog but due to money constrains I wouldn’t get started for next 2 months.
I m not a good writer and I m confused of what to write how much to write and where to find ideas to get started.
I tried to write SEO optimized articles but in no vain.
Please suggest some tips or ideas so that i can get started.
Thank you

Hi Harsh Bhayya
i am a big fan of you from Pakistan. I am new in this blogging field and i have found some answers in this great article. Can you tell me more about stop words like if our focus keyword has a stop word then what to do? and one more question that can we write an article of 100 to 200 words length? Actually i have made a magazine site and i want to make a category of latest news. And some news don’t have enough content to write. I will be thankful to u for reply.

Harsh, thanks for this nice reply for my help :-) . I am using SEO by YOAST plugin for WP but after publishing post Sometimes it shows some red alert for SEO to reduce the slug. What should i do harsh, sorry for asking again a question but this is my final doubt

@Suraj
Are you talking about Permalink Slug? Before you publish the blog post, click on Edit permalink below post-title in post editor, and remove un-necessary stop words like “An” “the” “and” and so on.

Yes a Complete detailed post. I have got a lot of results of how to write a SEO optimized post in wordpress. but none of them explained it properly with images, i got it from here,
but my only doubt is related to ‘interlinks’ . Harsh, Is this a SEO friendly way to link my content to the link of wikipedia to provide a better information to the visitors?

@Suraj
When linking out, it’s not just Wikipedia. Think of links as adding value to the post and which helps your reader to learn more about the topic you are writing about. Since Wikipedia is one great source of information, but it’s not necessarily need to be wikipedia only.

Atlast I found a post which I was searching for or rather expecting from a webmaster. It always bugs me how to properly use keywords in my post. But still I have a very big doubt Harsh. You chose long tail keywords like “Best iPhone RSS reader, Pulse iPhone RSS reader”

So are you going to fit them in the article and in headings?
I don’t know if my question is silly or serious but its one big doubt I have. Please do resolve it… Hope to get a reply from you sooner

@Abhishek
So I will be using that long tail keyword in Title, Permalink and 1 or 2 times in the post body.. The idea is to keep article writing very natural, like we normally write..At the end (Time of proof-reading) simply tweak the article a bit to optimise it for that particular keyword. The basic Onpage optimisation is going to be the same for Short-tail and long-tail Keyword. You should check out this article on On-page SEO: https://www.shoutmeloud.com/onpage-optimization-factors-seo.html

thanks for sharing post harsh,But i am facing the issue with bing API i have done everything you mentioned in the post still when i paste that generated api key into LSI field i am getting the Error”Invalid key”.I tried to generate it several time still the issue remains same..help me out.

We all know that H1 tag is most important heading tag. So, I changed my heading post title tag to H1 from H2. But within 1-2 days my page views dropped from 600-700 to 50-60. Does changing headings really harm ranking. As after the changes that I have made in heading tag most of my post is not showing in search results that were previously showing in first page. I also keep in mind that there is only one H1 tag on single post, no less important heading tag before H1 tag etc. Or there may be another reason for decreasing in ranking of my posts. Almost all of my post is not showing in search results that were in first page previously.

This is really an informative post shared by you. I want to ask you a question. We always search for keywords with high searches and low competition. For example, I want to write one post “Headache Remedies” or “How to get rid of pimples”. There is low competition and high searches for these terms. But I have seen some top results of Google Search Results. Their content seems to be unbeatable. I want to write over these topics. Can you tell me some tips to beat such posts? I have taken care of keywords density, uniqueness or any basic requirement that is necessary while writing. But it’s not giving any result. Please help me for the same. Any tips and suggestions would be really helpful.

I once publish a controversial article saying How a Condom can protect from Computer viruses. And lol, I was ranking for computer viruses keyword for more then a month without even targeting it. So Social media shares are important too. Specially G+ ( I thought Google was unbiased :P )

hello harsh
I am reading your articles for a long time.your articles are really inspiring indeed.If I choose different titles for readers as well as search engine.i have to write the search engine friendly article in title tag of(all in one seo plugin).but the permalink is controlled by default title of wordpress.i want to ask will it affect the permalink if I choose a different title for search engine.

Article was really awesome Harsh, But I am in confusion that what should be the permalink of a blog post it should be longer or shorter and if shorter than what permalink will be correct for my blog waiting for your positive response

Have been doing all the things mentioned over here.Only thing I was doing wrong was using generic keywords along with main keywords in meta keywords.I see you didn’t mentioned anything about meta description.Would love to hear your advice on it.

Hello friend, I have a new blog on blogger and I’m trying to optimize it but I find it very difficult and I’ve researched a lot to positions, but the majority of articles related to SEO optimization and tell me it’s much easier to optimize a blog on WordPress pluggins that exist in addition to help you optimize, you expicaciòn is very clear and quite explanatory friend today begin to create a wordpress blog and follow your advice step by step, thank you very much

Hello Harsh,
the article is excellent and provides lots of Do’s and Dont’s that each blogger should know. however i am trying so hard to get some traffic by following all this guidelines but the result is just opposite. can you provide some suggestion or tips to me.

Thanks a lot for sharing your insights with us Harsh. The entire post was worth the read and it answered this one question of mine that i wanted to know – the length of the blog post title and you gave the answer through a tip which was “less than 60 words”. You have explained almost every aspect of writing a perfectly optimized blog post. I would like to know about some SEO plugins that could be used for optimizing content. If you know any then please do let me know.

Hello I would like to know weather we can use all the small letters like for example “Great Things Happens” instead of that “Great things happens” can we use like this?
and mine is a photoblog so can i use 3 keywords for a post? coz i dont have any discription in it

Good tips, harsh. One thing I would like to ask in regards to the 2nd tip, i.e keyword selection. Like you wrote someday ’8 things after installing wordpress’. What keywords should we use in such posts ?

THANX. Very useful and informative blog post for me as i am a newbie in this.
Now i will pay more attention to these little details as anchor text and alt text for images … The part that described how to use or think of the right keywords was very interesting.

Though I knew a little about SEO, but this post surely makes things so much clearer. I have been thinking about shifting to wordpress also for a long time, as I have heard it is any day better than blogspot. I would need to try out everything mentioned here to get the feel of it.

@Harleen WordPress is any time better than BlogSpot for many reasons.. More over WordPress is considered as a professional platform.. Though if you are a hobby blogger, I would suggest stick to BlogSpot as WordPress requires lots of tech skills and you have to manage your own hosting…!!!
You can use my BlogSpot to WordPress migration Service if you want :) https://www.shoutmeloud.com/services

This is a great article. One reason I encourage clients to select a theme that is SEO friendly so they do not always have to rely on doing so much themselves. But of course, knowing the info you provide is a good thing so that you can maximize your posts.
Thanks.

Hello Harsh,
I have a question: My Blog is a dofollow Blog and I also use SEO super comments plugin so that the comment is indexed by Google. I have read your comment on some other Blog where you said that having dofollow comments does not hurt unless we get spam comments! So no doubts on the dofollow thing. But does the usage of such plugins help in SEO?

Good point on shortening up the permalink, definitely a smart idea eespecially when the post title is on the long side. I would have one additional recommendation though, that’s to not use any capital letters, instead they should all be lowercase.

This is exactly the article that I have found these days, thank you so much for the SEO check list and detailed descriptions for each item in the list.

About your tips on ALT image tips, could you please advice me “what is the best way to deal with images from Snag It?” I have two ways to do it:
– Save the image from Snag it’s clipboard and set the SEO name for it other than img0001.jpg. After that input this image to Windows Live Writer, the SEO image friendly will do the ALT & Title of image for us.
– Copy & past image(img0001.jpg) directly to post and manually enter the ALT & Title property.

I prefer the second way because it’s fast and convenience, but I am wonder that on the view of SEO what method is better? could you please advice me.

Ah, I have one more question, what is the SEO plugin that you used in your posttitle.png, is it All in one SEO :)

Harsh Agrawal Great work. Now i get the point how you blog is working. you stole my idea and presenting in your blog. Great work keep it up. I just have write a comment on your blog and you did stole whole idea. Great work. This is the idea behind the success of your blog. Great work . check the comment number 23 at.https://www.shoutmeloud.com/5-things-to-do-after-your-first-blog-post.html

You are telling not to use the stop words in the permalink but at the same post permalink you have used the stop word “to”. Also one thing i noticed that after you realize that your traffic has dropped due to panda effect etc your increases your post length (words per post).

The first tip needs a correction. The two items are a Title Attribute (often called a Title Tag and is shown in a search result) and the H1 (this is theme-dependent and seen in the body of the article). A “Meta Title” is not used by search engines for ranking purposes. It can show up in the and also occurs in a few other tags such as an image, e.g.

Hi,
Right now i am using all in one SEO. Recently i have changed the permalink of one post. Now i came to know the importance of it. further i am not using any inter links of posts. Here onwards i use insights plugin. Your article revealed many tips. Thanks for informative article.

Nice work Harsh. I had been making mistake to select meta keywords. Will help me to be precise with that now. I was using the common keywords that too in wrong way.
Thanks for teaching so many people SEO tips.

wowo great article harsh :-) just wanted to ask about the title change…i sometimes have to change my title..i need to change some of the titles of the old posts as I didnt pay attention to this stuff at the begining.changging titles will hurt ? :roll:

Its not only for guest writers but also applies to all the geeks. I think most of us know these thing but probably we are lazy to implement such seo things, on not only here (guest writers) but also on own blogs!

Great tips, and refresher. At times we can easily miss these out, taking time out to ensure that every element of your article is optimised will definitely pay off over the time. As it only takes an extra few mins to carry out these tasks.

Thanks for your advices. This post contains a lot of useful information! The theme I use on my blog uses H2 as default for post titles and if I use the H tags in the text the padding and stuff is all messed up.
Guess I have to fix that.
Thanks again, also for the hints concerning giving tags to articles ;)

You did it really great by publishing the email publicly. Very useful post for everybody so that they can pay more attention to the SEO and do the required. The tools and plugins you mention are wonderful. Its a real gem indeed. Thanks for sharing it.

I suggest use some free services to research keyword, such as: google trends, google keyword tool, google insights, etc.
Or some paid plugins for wordpress: keyword winner, seo scribe.
I’ve used them and they work very good

Great post, really. I tend to do the mistake of spamming too common keywords on the meta tags (or even keep them blank) :( It’s a new tip for me to be honest and I should do that from now on my every post!

Why we should use keyword field in all in one seo plugin to get ranking on those keywords, if we are already getting traffic from keywords related to those posts? I am confused. I never used keyword option for my blog because my blog posts are on top for the keywords on which I have written the post. can you please give me solid response so that I should start using that option :) ? Thanks..

This si the first article which I’ve read on how to upload a Blog Post. There are many articles on how to write a good blog post but barely any on how to upload them. Loved this so much that i’ve added this to my favorites.

Good tips, harsh. One thing I would like to ask in regards to the 2nd tip, i.e keyword selection. Like you wrote someday ‘8 things after installing wordpress’. What keywords should we use in such posts ?
Waiting for your reply.

Garish first step would be to find the best keyword and that you can take help of Keyword Suggestion tools. But anyways, if you write a post without doing a keyword research, you should think from a readers perspective that what keyword you would be using for searching something like that ” WordPress essential setting” “Steps after installing WordPress” and so on…

Thanks for suggesting.
But that post ‘8 things after…….wordpress’ contains 8 things and all that 8 terms are usually searched like wordpress permalink structure, wordpress security.
Now my question is, should we target this with all the 8 keywords or only the ‘steps after installing wordpress’ or both. Thanks, kindly reply.

Garish you meant keyword like:
WordPress permalink setting, WordPress discussion setting, WordPress privacy settings and so on??
If your answer is yes, then you can… But then use proper header tags and make sure you use a descriptive amount of words to explain those sub headings…!!

Yes Harsh, I meant that Keywords. Can We rank higher in Search Engine for all those keywords for the same post. As you and other webmasters say to focus on only one keyword per post, will not this contradict it. Also google will divide the priority into 8 keywords (if we use 8) instead of one and thus we will rank lower. Isn’t it ??
Sorry, I am asking too much.

Just a couple of questions.
1.How does the changing of a post title(after publishing the post) and republishing effects the blog? I remember reading somewhere that google will stop indexing it if we change the title after posting once. How true is that?
2.In your post you have mentioned not to change the permalink after posting. What are the consequences of it?
3.Even the permalink of this post contains stop words ( How, to). Isn’t that contradicting your post?

Hey Renu
One should not change the permalink else it will be broken link for old permalink but if you set a 301 redirection, it should not be an issue..
Changing post title later on is a bad thing in terms of search engine.. As your old post is already indexed and crawled by Google and post title tag is an important part of it….If you change your post title tag a lot, Google might take it as one of the spamming activities. As Google has already given ranking to that page because of it’s current SEO factor and if that page is performing good in search engine, you might not like to play with it’s on-page SEO structure…
In this post I have removed the last stop words “In” and rest “How to” and other keys are important..!!